Napolitano’s raid slowdown signals policy shift

The Washington Post reports that Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano is charting a “middle course” in immigration policies by slowing workplace raids and putting more pressure on the prosecution of companies that hire undocumented workers.

“Napolitano has highlighted other priorities,” the story says, “such as combating Mexican drug cartels and catching dangerous criminals who are illegal immigrants.”

But for some, the Homeland Security chief’s shift looks like a major one

when compared to the Bush administration’s massive workplace raids that routinely rounded up workers, often splitting families apart.

Sometimes U.S. citizens or “children citizens,” as their advocates call them, were involved.

Just last week, a new report showed that immigration law and their enforcement are “marginalizing what it means for (such) children to be U.S. citizens.”

The report, “Severing a Lifeline: The Neglect of Citizen Children in America’s Immigration Enforcement Policy,” says 3 million U.S. citizens are children of undocumented immigrants.

Homeland Security’s policies have “resulted in the arrest, detention and deportation of record numbers of undocumented immigrants over the past several years. In the process, tens of thousands of children of undocumented immigrants, including citizen children, have seen their families torn apart, or experienced the effective deportation of the entire family to countries as foreign to them as they are to other American children. The harm threatened or visited upon the citizen child in these circumstances is palpable and long-lasting,” the report says.